Getting Started
Your fighter does the fighting. You decide what they carry, where they go, and when to stop.
You press Adventure, pick where to fight, and your fighter goes. From then on they handle it: travelling, choosing targets, swinging, drinking potions when they need to.
You are not asked to play the fight. You are asked to decide what your fighter walks in carrying, and when to pull them out. That run is called a session.
What happens when you press Adventure
Your fighter travels to the difficulty you picked, finds something, and fights it. When it dies you get experience, gold and sometimes an item. Then they walk to the next one.
That loop repeats until one of two clocks runs out. While it runs you can watch, or you can close the tab and come back later. It keeps going either way.
What you cannot do is help with the swinging. Every fight is resolved on our servers, one beat at a time. That is why nobody can cheat it, and why you can be asleep for it.
The two clocks
Two things end a run, and it is usually the second one.
Fatigue is the ceiling. Your fighter has 100 units of it and loses one every 2 minutes, so the longest any run can last is 3h 20m. Nothing speeds it up or slows it down. It runs on wall clock time, at the same rate through fights, travel and standing still. When it hits zero your fighter comes home, and it refills for free the moment they do.
Health is what actually ends most runs. It does not come back on its own. There is no regeneration between fights, so damage carries from one fight straight into the next. The only thing that restores it is a potion, drunk automatically when your fighter drops low, worth 50% of their maximum health each. When the potions run out and the health does too, the run is over.
There is one exception, and it feels unfair the first time. If a single blow takes your fighter from standing to dead, there was no moment in which to drink anything. A full belt of potions will not save them. That is what deep difficulties do to an under-geared fighter, and it is why health and defence are worth as much as damage.
Potions, and the gold that buys them
Potions are bought before you leave and they do not keep. Whatever is left when the run ends is gone.
So the question before every run is how many to arm. The game asks it as a share of what you are carrying, and by default it will spend up to 50% of your gold on potions.
Which is where the Vault comes in. Gold sealed in the Vault is invisible to that sum. Everything in your purse is gold the run can spend. Everything in the Vault is gold it cannot touch.
What "idle" actually means here
It does not mean you never play. It means your attention is optional during a session. The fighting happens whether you are watching or not.
Between sessions, everyone is in town, and everyone plays the same game there. You equip what you found, sell what you did not, decide what to brew, and choose where to go next. Somebody who watches every fight and somebody who checks in twice a day arrive at the same town with the same decisions in front of them.
Watching does give you a few things the idle player does not have. You can retreat early and keep what you have. You can manage your bag as it fills, rather than letting the worst item be pushed out. And you can focus a piece of an enemy's gear to steer what echoes to you, on monsters and other players alike.
Town, in the order you will need it
Town is the one place nobody can attack you. Everywhere else, they can.
The Forge
Helt sells a small rotating stock, buys what you do not want, and breaks the rest down into materials.
The Alchemist
Senna's cauldron. Potions come from here, and recipes are found by brewing them.
The Gravekeeper
Wick trades PvP tokens for kill effects, titles and frames. Nothing here makes you stronger.
The Vault
Ossa holds what you are not carrying, including gold tonight's run cannot spend.
The one thing that is not automatic
Nothing equips itself. An item you find sits in your bag until you put it on. A fighter carrying a better sword in their bag is fighting with the worse one in their hand.